Typically, in conventional approaches as shown in FIG. 1, a reflector MCU 105 is designed as a monolithic application containing all control logic (for protocols 113 and the RTP pump 109) for intended processing which is not a fault tolerant design and such an implementation is prone to failure. When the reflector MCU 105 fails, the entire call may fail because the reflector handles the entire call. Furthermore, when bridging a conventional reflector MCU 105 with a conventional transcoder MCU 107, only one audio and video channel is used (e.g., between 109 and 111) because the transcoder MCU 107 can only accommodate one audio and video stream connected to it on each of its call legs from the endpoints.
This audio/video stream is either a switched stream or a mixed/composited stream. A switched stream allows only one of the reflector participants' audio or video to be seen on the transcoder MCU 107. A mixed/composited stream allows only all of the transcoder MCU 107 participants to be seen on the reflector MCU 105 in a composited form and limits the customer experience.
Attempts at achieving greater audio quality with conventional approaches have required tradeoffs. Specifically, if resources are used on the reflector for the mixing then it limits the scalability of the approach, and if the reflector acts a pure switching reflector then only one active speaker is heard on the transcoder side, resulting in a poor solution. As such, an improved approach to video conferencing systems with transcoder and reflector MCUs is needed to achieve higher scale and increased reliability and at the same time maintain the best customer experience.